Saturday, we again walked down to Decatur and found lunch at a restaurant called the Crescent City Brewhouse. Matt’s meal looked especially delicious:
From there, we walked back over to the Marketplace and got tickets for a tour on the Creole Queen. It would take us up the Mississippi to the Chalmette Battlefield and back.
It threatened to rain a few times, but did little more than sprinkle. The boat was great, and the captain’s narrative was way more interesting than I expected. He of course talked a lot about Katrina, and we saw some of the damage from the river.
At the battlefield, we all climbed off and went to walk around. The place was very calm and picturesque.
I learned what ramparts were. I’d never really thought about it before.
We stopped to visit the gift shop, then climbed back onto the boat. Walking on the levee was kind of exciting, too!
The steamboat had us back in New Orleans around 5pm. We hopped off and decided to go get the streetcar down St Charles to see the Garden District. I wanted to show Matt the haunted house we’d stayed in last time!
The cemetery was unfortunately closed, but we got a good view of it. We’ve both visited New Orleans cemeteries before, too. Also, the Castle Inn of New Orleans is now a private residence, and is for sale!! What will all the ghost-hunters do?
We did some more wandering about the Garden District, and headed cityward in search of food. We were slowing down a bit; it was hot, and we’d walked a lot.
I love that you’ll find beads EVERYWHERE in New Orleans. A constant party reminder.
We found a place called Igor’s Bar that was recommended, so we went in for lunch/dinner. After sitting there for a while with no service, however, we got up and left. We headed down St Charles a little further, and wound up at the Avenue Pub. That place was awesome. We had food and beers and enjoyed watching the locals. Then we hopped on a streetcar and rode back to Canal Street.
We dropped our stuff off at the hotel, freshened up (it’s critical in a city that’s constantly hot and 90% humidity!), and headed back out again. At that point, I’d developed some amazing blisters on my feet, so I had to half-limp. How do you get blisters in flipflops? Especially when you wear them 6 months out of the year?
Our next stop on the list (yes, we had a classic bars list – there are a lot of famous places in New Orleans!) was Sazerac. Inventors of the… yep, you guessed it.
It’s the hotel bar at the Roosevelt, which means it was full of people with far more money (and much better dressed) than us. We hardly cared about that, though, because we probably knew way more about its history than they did. The place was pretty full, but we managed to get seats on a coach as people were leaving. Some ladies came in a bit later and asked if they could sit at the remaining chairs at our table; we said yes, but it was a little bit awkward. A couple seats finally opened at the bar, so we left the table to the ladies and took those instead. It’s way more awesome when you can watch the bartenders working, anyway.
We left there with a glass (don’t worry, we paid for it) and made our way to another oldschool hotel bar, the Swizzle Stick. The cutest gay server in the world got us a couple more cocktails, and we hung out for a while. We didn’t want to stay out too late, though, because we had big plans involving a rental car the next morning! We managed to be back at the hotel before 1am, which I believe should earn you a medal in New Orleans.